


What Help and Comfort They May

by RecessiveJean



Category: The Sherwood Ring - Elizabeth Marie Pope
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Family History, Gen, Ghosts, Pregnancy, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:43:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meg has enough on her mind already without also having to deal with the family ghosts. But what with Great-uncle Enos recovering from his stroke, Dad obsessing over what he's going to publish next and Mother keeping a secret of her own, Meg may soon be grateful for whatever help she can get.</p><p>Even if it does come from the ghosts of Rest-and-be-thankful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Help and Comfort They May

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ione](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ione/gifts).



“Do you think Mother might be going mad?”

It’s the kind of question most fathers wouldn’t appreciate you asking, but Dad is not most fathers. He looked up from his book with a thoughtful frown.

“Hmm,” he said. “Of course anything is  _possible_ , but I don’t think it likely. Why do you ask, Meg?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I leaned back and watched the countryside rattle past the train window. “I suppose it’s the ghosts.”

“Ah, yes,” Dad looked back to his book, made a note in the margin and smiled as if at a private joke. “I’d nearly forgotten your mother’s ghosts. Has she been mentioning them in her letters?”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything more on the subject. I could see from his smile there was no way I’d get him to take it seriously. You’d think a man might worry if his wife looked to be going mad, but Mother is so reliable when it comes to most things, I suppose Dad wasn’t bothered.

I felt just the opposite: Mother is usually  _so_  steady, her talk of ghosts bothered me a great deal, especially how matter-of-fact she was when she wrote about them. According to Mother they had names and histories and she talked as if they were neighbours I might meet any day, rather than a bedtime story I’d long since outgrown.

When Great-uncle Enos had his stroke, Mother was worse than ever. She’d gone directly overseas to nurse him and hire a long-term carer, because she was his nearest surviving relation and that’s the sort of thing nearest surviving relations are expected to do. Mother isn’t always the most conventional soul, but when it comes to Great-uncle Enos, she is propriety personified. She took an aeroplane over the water and spent the past two months nursing devotedly at Rest-and-be-thankful, the same house where all the ghosts lived.

Or didn’t, I suppose.

Ever since she left, her letters had been full of ghosts. The only thing she wrote about more frequently than the family spooks was Great-uncle Enos himself, and a little medical detail goes a long way, so I paid more attention to the ghost parts almost from the start.

 _I keep hoping I’ll see them_  she confessed in her last letter.  _That’s only my foolishness, of course; there’s no reason they should appear now. I don’t think there’s any great problem to be overcome, at least not one that they could help with. It’s only that Uncle Enos is nearing his time, which is just a fact of life. He’s quite comfortable, all considered, and the doctor says—_

Then had come more medical detail, so I went back to skimming, and worrying that Mother was going mad.

Surely talking about ghosts as if they were real was a symptom of lunacy. But Mother was so  _ordinary_ , otherwise. It seems like madness should be obvious, like it is in books where the mad person is shut away in an attic or sanatorium, and their hair is like a bird’s nest. Often their eyes glitter feverishly, and they rant about the most impossible things.

Mother isn’t like that. She keeps her hair neatly done, dark and rather smart, and her eyes have never glittered that I know of, even six months ago when she got the most dreadful flu. She only sometimes gets a little ranty when she and Dad disagree over a point of research, and then Dad gets just as ranty as she, so you hardly notice she’s even yelling because they match each other shout for shout. In all, she doesn’t seem a likely candidate for Bedlam.

Except, of course, for her ghosts.

At least Mother would soon be in better company than a pack of ghosts and her ailing uncle. She cabled last week that we should come over too, now I was on holiday. She thought Great-uncle Enos would like the idea of family around him, especially if he was nearing his end.

“He certainly would,” Dad agreed, when he read the cable. “Why, they could make a whole painting of that scene: ‘Last Blessing of the Patriarch’ or something like of the kind. That’s your uncle Enos to the ground. Of course we’ll go.”

Dad and I had docked in New York just that afternoon. We caught the last train out, and I’d had all afternoon and evening to sit back in my seat, stare out the window and wonder if Mother might be losing her mind. It seemed so  _unlikely_  a thing to think of her, but the possibility that she might be speaking the perfect truth seemed less likely still.

“Do you think they could be real?” I wondered, but Dad had already gone back to his book, and he either didn’t hear me or else was determined to pretend he had not, so I left him alone until the porter came along to announce the stop at New Jerusalem.

“This is us, Dad,” I said. He didn’t look up, so I gave him a little poke as I leaned forward to gather my bag. “Dad!”

“Hrm?” he looked up from the book, blinking at me as if I were a bright light turned on in a dark room. Then he looked out the window. “Oh, this is us.”

I passed him his bag, and left him to find his own way down the aisle behind me. Dad’s not usually muzzy-headed, but he had a lot on his mind. He’s a candidate to fill some important vacancy or other at the university, and he’s determined to publish something really spectacular in an effort to secure his place, but of course that’s put him completely off daily life. When Dad’s about to publish something he starts leaving socks in the wash basin and teaspoons in the ice box, and muttering that perhaps it’s not too late for him to go into the law, instead.

“You’d be terrible at law,” Mother always tells him, “now put your socks in the hamper like a grown-up, Pat, and stop worrying over nothing.”

It’s sound advice, but he rarely heeds it. The scholars have never actually looked down on Dad’s writing that I know of, but the very first thing he ever did as a student—some complicated piece of research built entirely on our family history—was so widely well received that he’s convinced he’ll never be able to do half as well ever again.

Mother calls that Dad’s particular kind of foolishness, although coming from a woman whose correspondence is full of ghosts, I’m not sure that’s fair.

I was right about Dad being able to manage his own way off the train. Once he’d put the book away and gathered his bag, he was like a whole other person. By the time he swung down onto the platform, he gave the porter a friendly wave and took a look around the station.

“Well, Meg,” he said, and slung an arm around my shoulder, “what do you think of the land of your ancestors?”

I thought the land of my ancestors could do with rather less rain and a lot more tidying-up—the sad little platform was waterlogged, the boards warped out of shape and littered with empty cellophane packets—but instead I only said we had better find a cab.

“There is no cab,” Dad said cheerfully, as though the lack of vehicles for hire were a feature rather than deficiency of the region. “Your mother promised she’d bring a car and come to meet us. But if the car she got isn’t any more reliable than the one I hired when I was last here, she may have broken down along the road.”

I felt he was entirely too sanguine about Mother maybe being stranded in the rain with a broken-down auto, but my parents are like that. The most dreadful things can go wrong and they only look at each other like it’s the start of a wonderful adventure.

That evening, for example. Mother never did come with the car, though we waited for her three quarters of an hour. At last Dad said “I’m for walking! How about you?” and since I wasn’t about to sit alone on a station platform in the drizzle and the dark, I gathered my case and we started down the road together.

The walk was dreadful, all back roads and mud the whole way, but I bore it well thanks to Dad. He has that knack of making bad things better. My shoes soaked through before we’d gone half a mile, and my mackintosh wasn’t equal to keeping all the rain off my neck, but as we walked Dad told me all about the first time he’d ever visited New Jerusalem.

“I lodged with a nice, timid, respectable lady,” he explained, pausing to nudge me the right way around an especially muddy puddle. “Mrs. Dykemann was no end of taken with me and got me introductions all around the area to help with my research.”

“That was the Sherwood History, wasn’t it?” I said, mostly to do my part to make it a conversation. “The piece you had published just after you married Mother.”

“That’s the one.” Dad’s voice took on that soft, pleasant tone it always does when he manages to think of Mother and research at the same time. “We sat up hours into the night that first year, just going over all the diaries and letters and putting them into some kind of order. She was a marvel. The insights she had about the region during that time period were nothing short of remarkable! It helped give a real flair to the paper. Sort of felt like you were really there, you know?”

He talked on that way, and I listened. We covered miles together, all through the drizzle and the dark. At one point the rain lightened as we travelled through a heavy, ancient wood and the trees offered some shelter, but I didn’t like to break the spell by suggesting we stop for a rest. Dad’s the most entertaining speaker, once he gets going. He got as far into the tale where  his next publication was interrupted by my birth, and the story of after I was born he and Mother had a great row over what I was to be called, which Dad says put him right out of a researching mood for almost a month.

“Your mother kept insisting on Patricia Margaret,” he told me, which I knew very well by now, “and I wanted to call you Margaret Patricia, and neither of us could agree on which to choose. Of course as you know by now . . . damn it all, where  _are_  we?”

That last question was not a usual part of the story. I stopped walking, as did Dad, and we looked around.

“We don’t seem to be anywhere in particular,” I said, but that clearly wasn’t the answer Dad had been after. He scratched the back of his neck and frowned at the dark hill looming before us.

“Look, Meg, I think you’d better wait here while I jog back. If I’ve missed the turning, that means we’ve come clean through Martin’s Wood and are on our way to Goshen. I’d better run back to that  house we passed and beg the use of their telephone.”

“Can’t I come along?” I wondered, but Dad, in one of his rare moments of paternal assertion, said I’d best not.

“I think it might be irresponsible to make you walk any further in this wind and damp. Can you stay under those trees until I come back? We  _must_  be near the place now, we’ve certainly walked far enough. Only I can’t seem to figure out just how far.”

I would have offered to keep going regardless, except everything he said was true, and even telling him that we were nowhere in particular had cost me more breath than it should have.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll wait here.”

Dad saw me settled under the thick collection of oaks. I perched on the edge of my case as he promised he would come back directly he found either Rest-and-be-thankful, or Mother and the car. Then he set off into the night, and the wind and rain were such that he couldn’t have gone a hundred yards before he was completely lost to view.

While I sat on my case and waited, the wind blew, the rain fell, and since I wasn’t moving anymore I soon felt chilled all through. I was just preparing to feel properly sorry for myself when a man walked past.

It should have seemed strange, a solitary man out for a walk in weather like that, but I was in no position to judge a thing like that, and his choice to walk in the rain wasn’t even the oddest thing about him. He wore a heavy dark cloak and carried, of all things, a punch-hole tin lantern that shed a feeble glow around him. The light it cast was so meagre, I didn’t even see him until he was almost upon me. As he drew abreast of the tree where I sheltered, he slowed his pace and held up his lantern as if to get a better look at this oddity of a stranded traveller.

I was not altogether wary of him, but I’m no fool. I looked pointedly away to make it plain I would not communicate with him in any way, so he had really better keep walking.

Apparently the man had no idea what it looked like when a girl didn’t care to speak with him, for he stopped anyway, and cleared his throat.

I continued to look away.

He cleared his throat again, and spoke in strident tones. “If you  _please_ , Miss.”

He spoke the words in that way people say something because it’s a social nicety they’ve got to say, and not because they’re feeling genuinely courteous toward you. In fact, he sounded rather like it was he who was doing me the favour by addressing me in the first place.  _If you please_  indeed!

My head snapped right around, I looked him full in the face and said “I do  _not_  please, Sir, and I think that neither do you.”

I’d meant it to come out as an indictment of his daring to speak to me, but he took it altogether wrong. He laughed, and after a moment I heard the other way: that neither of us were any too pleasing to anyone.

In his case I think that might have been true. Now I’d seen him full on, with lantern light warming his face and sharpening the planes of his cheekbones, I saw an air of self-assurance that made me want nothing more than to smack it right off him.

His dark hair was worn long, of which style my second cousin Mildred vocally disapproves, and tied neatly back from his face. He also wore, as I said, a  _cloak_ , and overall should have seemed far more theatrical than he actually did.

“I do not intend to trouble you,” he promised. Some of the frost had gone out of his voice, as if his own laugh had warmed him up. “I only meant to say if you’d like to sit someplace warm and dry, the George Tavern is just around the next corner. Although they are closed to business at this hour, you will find Mrs. Hopegood still in residence. I’m sure she’ll let you in.”

It was such a helpful, practical suggestion that I felt ashamed of my earlier behaviour.

“Thank you,” I said meekly, “I’m very grateful.”

He bowed his head and continued on his way, as if the only reason he’d come out in the rain was to direct me to the tavern. He hadn’t gone ten steps before the dark swallowed him again and I was alone in the night.

I lugged my case along down the road, continuing in the same direction Dad and I had been travelling. When I came round the bend I found it exactly as the man with the cloak had said: a low, dark stone building with lights glowing in the windows and an old-fashioned signboard over the door, the words  _George Tavern_  burned deep into the wood.

I set my case down at the door, suddenly unsure of how to proceed. If it was an actual tavern, I was likely not permitted to enter unaccompanied. Of course, surely under the circumstances . . .

In the end I compromised by knocking. There was a pause, much briefer than I’d expected, and the door opened to reveal a warmly-lit open interior, all ancient dark floors and beams, and the sort of person who is best described as “plump and motherly,” as if mothers only come in one shape and general attitude. I was suddenly conscious of looking pretty awful, because the plump, motherly person took one look at me and actually gasped, pressing both dimpled hands to her mouth.

“Oh my dear,” she said, “come right inside!”

It was the thing I wanted more than anything at the moment, but I was still conscious of my case at the roadside, and my father searching for a house he’d not seen in seventeen years.

“I think,” I said, “I had first better—” but then wouldn’t you know, just like some fool heroine in the sort of book I despise, I toppled over the threshold and collapsed in a faint on her scrubbed wood floor.

 

* * *

 

When I woke, I already felt better. My clothes were still wet but I was lying on a kind of bench and covered with something so soft, warm and deliciously dry that my first thought was to go back to sleep and enjoy it. I only fought the urge by remembering I couldn’t possibly be home yet, and instead opened my eyes to look around.

I was in a wide, low-ceilinged room like something from centuries ago. The beams were all smoke-blacked and ancient, and the fire blazing in the great stone hearth warmed me as much as the soft pale knitting drawn up to my chin.

What little furniture the room boasted was old-fashioned too, and far from decorative. A pair of wing-back chairs that looked rather the worse for their age flanked the hearth, and a bright-eyed, pretty girl in blue perched on the edge of one, watching me intently.

“Oh good,” she said, when I looked at her. “You’re awake.”

“Was I asleep for very long?” I wondered. The girl shook her head, and her hair danced around her face. The burnished copper curls were dressed in a style every bit as out of date as the rest of the tavern room.

“You were only unconscious long enough to be brought in here,” she reassured me. “Mrs. Hopegood covered you up, and now she’s trying to work out who your people are, and how best to return you to them. I don’t know that she’ll manage it, though; she’s begun by calling the inn, but I’m afraid their telephone is out with all this wind.”

“The inn won’t help anyway,” I said. “My mother is staying at her family’s place, Rest-and-be-thankful. Do you know it?”

The girl’s eyes sparkled, as if she found the situation more amusing than she had cause to.

“Oh yes,” she said, “I know it. I know Peggy Grahame, as well. I’m afraid her automobile broke down in Martin’s Wood; that’s practically tradition. Your father should have reached her by now, though, and you’re not too far from home; you’ve only gone a little past the turning on the Goshen road.”

I nodded vaguely, and felt that such a rush of information probably deserved some sharing in turn. I wanted to introduce myself properly and ask her name, but the warmth of the fire and the blanket, plus the fatigue of travelling across a whole ocean, were telling on me. I could only think of one question that seemed important.

“Will my parents know where to find me?”

“I’m sure they will. The George is the building nearest the spot where your father left you.”

I was about to ask her how she could possibly  know that when a clatter and shout went up at the front door, and I heard somebody—almost certainly Mrs. Hopegood—bustle down the corridor to answer the summons. Plump, motherly people like Mrs. Hopegood tend to bustle everywhere they go.

I shut my eyes just a minute, surrendering to the warmth of the room and the comfort of my place under the rug, and heard Mrs. Hopegood cry “oh, Peggy! Bless me, is she yours? I should have known from the look of her. Too pretty to be a Grahame, they always did say of you, and I think it’s fair to say that your girl—but yes, of course she’s just through here.”

A cool breeze touched my face, and I thought it must be the red-haired girl crossing to receive my parents, but when I opened my eyes I saw only Mother, dripping wet, dark hair plastered to her skull, smiling and touching my cheek with a cold hand.

“Meg,” she said, “what a welcome! I’m so sorry. Daddy has got the motor running again, but for how long I wouldn’t care to say. Let’s hurry up and get you home.”

 

* * *

 

Rest-and-be-thankful wasn’t home for me, of course, but for Mother it was the closest thing to a home she had before she married Dad, and for all she hadn’t lived there very long, she always called it so.

I didn’t see it properly that first night because of the dark and the rain, and also because I was settled deep in the back seat of an ancient rattletrap car, which my father introduced as “old Betsy, my greatest nemesis in all this world” before he handed me into the back seat and tucked me snugly down under a ratty fur robe. Then he and Mother sat up front, and I just  _knew_  they were holding hands. You could tell by the way they looked at each other when Dad should have been watching the road.

We hadn’t very far to drive, but in Betsy it seemed we’d taken our lives in our hands. She lurched up two hills in fits and starts, very nearly stalled three times among the heavy trunks of Martin’s Wood, and gravity alone got her down around the final, sweeping curve that made up the front drive of Rest-and-be-thankful. She choked, spat and sputtered to a stop in front of a great, dark house. I craned my neck, trying to make out anything more than the golden glow of light that filtered through a few windows.

“Home,” Mother said again, and I heard in her voice how tired she was. “I’m for bed.”

There were three steps out front, very shallow and wide. We didn’t even have to knock; the door was swung open as we reached it and a very old, very stooped man in coat and tails stepped grandly back to admit us.

“Welcome home Sir; Madam; Miss,” he whispered. The effect I expect he’d been trying for was spoilt both by the rattle of his voice, and by the way he stopped halfway through “Madam” to cough like a consumptive. “Your rooms are ready.”

“I should hope so,” Dad said, putting up his eyebrow at Mother the way he always does when he’s having a little too much fun. “Haven’t you been here two months already, Peggy? What sort of service are they providing, if your room isn’t ready?”

“Tsk,” said Mother, which I think was shorthand for ‘don’t tease the butler.’ Then she smiled at the butler himself and said “thank you, Christopher.”

Christopher gallantly tried for a bow, which was a mistake. Dad caught him just before he could pitch over, and gently righted him again.

“There’s a cold supper laid on the sideboard,” Christopher went on, “if you would care to partake.”

Mother said she thought we’d all better change into dry things first, before we caught our deaths. She stripped me of my mackintosh and shoes and showed me to my room, where Dad had already deposited my case. With a bit of digging I managed to find a skirt and blouse that water hadn’t leaked through to dampen.

Mother and Dad were already downstairs when I got there. They were seated shoulder to shoulder at the dining table, with the sideboard behind them, which meant they both had a clear view of my face when I walked into the dining room and saw the full-length portrait hanging over the sideboard.

I stopped dead in the doorway, and stared. Mother and Dad stared back.

“Meg?” Dad frowned. “Something wrong?”

Mother, as usual, was marginally more perceptive.

“Darling,” she said, “you look like you’ve seen a—”

Then she broke off and followed my gaze over her shoulder, so we were both looking at the painting.

It was of a style you only see in museums or old family homes. We have an old family home in England too, with portraits much the same. But it was not the style which caught my attention; it was the subject. He was a young man, striking a pose a little too lordly for his age. He wore his dark hair tied neatly back from a proud, angular face, and stared down at us from his place of honour on the wall as if to ask by what right we ate in  _his_  dining room.

He had worn the same expression when he stared at me on the road side, though I suspect when the portrait had been painted, he’d been rather more . . . alive.

His face made a real contrast to Mother, who turned back to stare at me with almost no expression at all. “Ah,” she said, in a much different tone. “I see.”

Then she cut herself a piece of ham, and didn’t say much else for the rest of the night

 

* * *

 

I gave Mother a wide berth the next morning. I knew when I saw her I’d want to say something, and aside from “I’m so glad you’re not going mad” I wasn’t sure what  _to_  say.

“Am  _I_  going mad?” was of course one question I could ask her, but somehow, I didn’t think I was. I also didn’t think Mother had ever been in danger of going mad.

There were ghosts at Rest-and-be-thankful, and that was all there was to it.

I hid in the library for most of the morning, curled up in a delicious armchair by the fire and pretending to read a book, but really just working out how I’d apologise to Mother for something she didn’t even know I thought of her.

I was still hiding when I heard the delicate clearing of a throat. I peeked over the edge of my book to find the red-haired girl of last night smiling at me. As soon as I saw her, I realised at once who she was, and felt a perfect fool for not having figured it out sooner.

“You’re Eleanor Shipley. Or do you prefer Eleanor Grahame?”

She laughed.

“I suppose that all depends—how ill did Dick behave himself when you met on the road last night?”

“I didn’t care for him,” I told her frankly, and Eleanor Shipley’s eyes danced.

“Then I will declaim his name, for the present,” she decided. “I am glad you made it home safely, Dick’s manners notwithstanding. And I’m sorry your introduction to the area was such a  _wet_  one. It’s the time of year, you know, and what the rain can do to the roads. And,” she added thoughtfully, “the fields, too. In good weather they can be used as a rough kind of highway between Shipley Farm and Rest-and-be-thankful, but I would not recommend them at present. They’re even worse than the roads.”

“I’m glad I didn’t try it, then,” I murmured.

“In the summer they’re quite pleasant, though. We used to play there as children.”

I divined who she meant by ‘we’ thanks to Mother’s stories.

“You, Dick and . . .” I cast about for the third name. “Barbara?”

Eleanor nodded. “Yes, and Barbara.”

We were all such friends as children (said Eleanor Shipley ) though I was closer with Barbara in those days, in part because of our both being girls, but also because we thought it great fun to set against Dick every chance we got. And he made it so  _easy_ , too!

I remember one morning in particular when I was about eight years old, and they both came running over the fields from Rest-and-be-thankful because their tutor had set them some task or other. Dick considered the work too dull for a June morning, and Barbara would never let Dick run out on schoolwork by himself, so she had come along too. When they arrived they were in a foul temper with each other.

“Good morning,” I greeted them.

“Good morning, Eleanor,” answered Dick, in a particularly superior manner I always hated.

Barbara apparently didn’t care for his tone any more than I did. She scowled up at him and gave a mighty kick to his shin. He howled and reached for her, but she danced out of his way and cried “as if you didn’t have that coming!”

Then she turned on me and, in practically the same breath, said “Eleanor,  _is_  the Aegean Sea not connected to the Euxine Sea in a way that allows for travel between them?”

It wasn’t the oddest question she had ever asked. Both the Grahame children were mad on geography, so I’d been required to admire many handsome maps in their library on rainy days. The weather in the region being what it is, I’d been obliged to learn many things my education would otherwise have neglected.

I was searching my memory for the answer when Dick cut in, all boyish impatience and Grahame condescension.

“Don’t be so foolish, Barbara! As if Eleanor could know anything about it.”

It was when he said such things, in his dreadful know-all voice, that I best understood Barbara’s inclination to kick his shins. I put up my chin and adopted the sweetest, most modest tone I knew.

“ _If_  you could please leave off being such the expert on all matters for just two minutes, Dick, I would remind you that the Euxine Sea joins the Aegean by way of the Bosphorus, the Propontis and the Hellespont strait, in that order. I say ‘remind you’ because just last week you made a point of lecturing me on the subject—and throwing in a lot of Argonauts besides—when I only wanted to ask where the Euxine Sea  _was_. But of course, you couldn’t resist showing off how you knew that and so much more.”

“You see?” Barbara turned on him, a lithe dark fury with chin upraised and fists on her hips. “My naval officers  _can_  sneak up on yours. I don’t care how all-knowing you think yourself on the subject, I could win a war  _just_  as easily as you, Richard Grahame!”

Of course that made about as much sense to me as any language spoken along the banks of the Aegean itself. When Dick, all stung pride and sullen fury, took himself off to a different corner of the field to sulk, Barbara apologised for all but talking Greek in front of me, and explained the game they played.

“We imagine we’ve each command of an army in a particular region, and must conquer each other. To make it more challenging we aren’t permitted to look at a map for it, and must navigate only from memory. I sent my navy down along the Bosphorus to come on his from behind, and of course I’d have beat him hollow, but Dick insisted I could never take an army of that size down the Bosphorus, and anyway, he wasn’t even sure the seas connected where I said they did. Because he’s petty that way.”

Dick, as near as I could tell, was petty in just about every way that involved losing a game, but I decided to leave it to his own flesh and blood to say so.

“So you’ve won?” I asked, and Barbara nodded, richly satisfied.

“Yes, but it’s not official until he gives me his flag. I doubt he will. He never has, although I surrender my flag every time I lose.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a crudely-stitched scrap of fabric, a faded chintz print that looked as if it had been trimmed from a housedress past all service. A device of some sort had been basted to the front, and when Barbara held it up, I saw it was cut in the form of a pennant.

“This is mine,” she said proudly. “Dick’s isn’t nearly as good, because I said I wouldn’t make it for him.”

I murmured my compliments on her needlepoint, and asked if she cared to look for early strawberries.

“Not at present,” said Barbara. “Actually, we hadn’t only come over to ask you to settle the argument. That sort of developed along the way. We really wanted to ask if you’d come with us into Martin’s Wood and help spring all Mr. Porson’s rabbit snares.”

I thought that sounded exactly the sort of sport to liven up a steady June morning, and agreed at once.

Eleanor Shipley concluded her story as if springing rabbit snares were the most obvious diversion in the world. I could not agree.

“Rabbit snares?” I said, staring at her. “Why did you want to spring rabbit snares?”

Eleanor made a face.

“Mr. Porson was never a pleasant individual, even before he took to siding with the redcoats.”

She made no other explanation than that, but put her head to the side, as if listening. Then she smiled.

“That will be your father coming along to ask you to lunch. I loved my lunches here as a girl. There was never better sport than watching Dick and Barbara carry on a conversation without ever saying a word to each other—they used their feet, you know. Kicked each other under the table, and you could watch their faces go all ways, depending on what was said. But,” she concluded these reminisces with a quick little gesture, “I expect your lunch will hold its own diversions.”

Then she crossed to the study doors and stepped lightly through, just as Dad put his head around the corner of the library and saw me sitting in the armchair, not reading my book.

“There you are, Meg,” he said. “Lunch is ready.”

 

* * *

 

I managed to avoid Mother for the rest of the day simply because she spent so much time with Great-uncle Enos. She took trays up to him and ate there, holding some sort of conversation or other. I wasn’t sure how coherent he was, but Mother persisted.

Out of embarrassment over not knowing how to apologise for thinking her mad, I’d gladly have avoided her for even longer, but of course I hadn’t her working knowledge of the house, and perhaps my choice to stay in the library for the second day in a row hadn’t been the cleverest. She found me just after breakfast the next morning.

“Oh there you are!” She smiled at the sight of me curled up in my armchair. “Goodness, Meg, I don’t think you’ve ever looked so much like a Grahame as you do now.”

It’s the kind of thing parents are always saying, about how much you do or don’t take after their side. My parents are as bad about that as anybody, saying I have the Sherwood this, or the Grahame that. I think it’s almost become a sport for them by this point.

But something in the way Mother said so this time caught my attention. Like she said it because she had seen another Grahame, sometime, sit just where I was at that moment, just as I was doing then.

It must have been that strange note in her voice that made me look at her closer. It was the first I had seen her properly since we arrived—her whole, full self, dry and standing—and I was suddenly conscious of some change. It wasn’t that she looked tired, though she did, or even that I hadn’t seen her in more than two months, though I hadn’t. It was that she seemed . . .  _more_. Like for all that it wearied her, Rest-and-be-thankful had also done its best to fill her out, too.

Or maybe that was only Gladiola’s cooking.

“How is Great-uncle Enos today?” I asked. Mother shook her head.

“It’s not one of his better days. He’s less coherent, but that doesn’t  necessarily mean anything. He makes grand speeches, of course, when his strength will permit. He says a lot of deathbed type things, because that’s his style. You know, insists that Dad and I must carry on the family in the manner that it deserves, the two great lines united once more . . . I only say ‘yes, Uncle Enos’ and pat his hand until he falls asleep. I don’t think it’s what he wants to hear, but at the same time, I don’t know what else he can expect me to say.”

“Is he alone up there now?”

“No, your dad’s with him. That’s why I came down—he’s trying to tell Dad something about a journal, and he seems to think it’s important. I thought perhaps seeing it will put him at ease.”

“I could look for it,” I volunteered. Mother looked pleased and relieved.

“Would you, darling? That would be an enormous help. I think it must be in his study, just through there,” she indicated the doors at the far end of the library. “He kept his most important documents there. You can check his desk, in case it’s something he was working on just before the episode, but otherwise I’m afraid you’ll need to hunt through the bookshelves.”

“What sort of journal is it?” I asked, already getting to my feet. But Mother was vague on the particulars.

“He keeps calling it the  _first_  journal. I wonder if it might be one he kept as a boy, but that’s just my guess. I can only suggest you put aside every diary or the like that you find, and we’ll let him tell us which it is.”

I promised to do my best, and started across the library to the study door. When I got there I looked back, and found Mother still hovering in the doorway.

“Was there something else?” I asked.

“No,” said Mother. “No, I suppose not.” Then she walked away, and it occurred to me that perhaps Mother had been avoiding me every bit as earnestly as I’d been avoiding her.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

 

* * *

 

I poked through every bookshelf in search of the journal Great-uncle Enos had asked for, but with so little information to go on, there wasn’t much way of knowing if I’d found it. I found generations’ worth of books and papers, housekeeping ledgers and files. Among those were no less than thirteen diaries, one of which caught my eye because it was written in an unformed hand, like that of a young child.

Turning to the flyleaf, I read the inscription:  _For Barbara, on the occasion of her eighth birthday. Be discreet and charitable in your introspection, and lend your hands to the service of others. Kind regards, Aunt Susanna._

It seemed a very formal and lecturing kind of dedication to a little girl, but maybe that’s how things were, back then. Or maybe that was just Aunt Susanna.

To judge by the first few entries little Barbara Grahame had composed, a strong case was to be made for that being the very nature of Aunt Susanna.

 _Aunt Susanna is like a blancmange,_ scribbled Barbara, with a maximum of imagination and industry, though little in the way of charity.  _She is soft and doughy all over, and every time she embraces me I fear I will suffocate_.  _Dick says you cannot smother for being hugged, but since she does not hug him, and only smacks his cheek a little to see if he will flinch so she may say he is not yet a man, I think he can be no authority on the subject._

_Though perhaps I should be glad at least she does not smack me._

Vastly entertained, I carried the book over to the desk, turned the full force of the lamp on it and read the next few entries in rapid succession.

_Richard Grahame is the bane of my existence._

_From his discomfort I derive my subsistence._

_Out of all brothers, I divine_

_There is not one more rotten than mine._

_Dick has just spied over my shoulder and told me I should better attend to my history lesson, if this is the result when I turn my hand to poetry. I have kicked him for that. It was deeply satisfying. I do not even care that Mr McTavish caught me at it, and assigned me one of Virgil’s very dullest to commit to memory and recite by Monday._

_I hope Dick limps for a week._

A further notation was squeezed in at the bottom of the same page:   _He did not limp for even ten hours. I must rehearse my kicking. And my poetry._

Could this be the journal Uncle Enos meant? It was almost certainly the first journal of Barbara Grahame. I could not imagine her having kept an earlier one. I put it on the very top of the pile, and continued my search.

I turned up two more journals, very dry logs of some nineteenth-century Grahame’s daily meals and libations spread over the course of a dozen years, and although I didn’t think them likely candidates, they were also added to the pile. Then I called for Dad and we carried the whole lot up to Great-uncle Enos, who looked very small in his great, wide bed.

I hadn’t seen him in three years, and I remembered him much differently. When he saw me he jerked a little, like a puppet on strings.

“Ehh?” he said, and Mother at once leaned forward in her chair to press her hand against his.

“This is Meg, Uncle Enos. You remember my daughter? Margaret Patricia Sherwood.”

Great-uncle Enos twitched at the sound of my whole name. He rolled his eyes toward Dad, and looked . . . not angry, exactly. Frustrated.

I supposed it  _would_  be frustrating, lying in bed and not even able to speak properly. I stepped forward and indicated the journals with my chin.

“I hope one of these is the journal you wanted, Uncle,” I said. But as each was held up and read for him, he got more and more agitated, til he was thrashing about in the bed and Mother said we’d better stop.

“Take them away for now please, Meg,” she said. “I’ll go over the rest when he feels . . . different.”

So I took the ones he’d already seen away with me, and as I tried to replace them on the shelves in the study, I found one of them was the very first diary of Barbara Grahame, aged eight.

Lunch was not for another hour yet, so I picked up the composition book of Barbara Grahame and flipped to the entry directly after the one featuring her first effort at poetry. It seemed her misadventures in the schoolroom had been nearly as numerous as those of her brother.

_I botched my recitation, and Mr. McTavish reported me to Father with full prejudice. I am in disgrace and have been forbidden supper._

_I was scheming how I might sneak down after dark to raid the pantry, only Dick came up to me after the meal with a napkin, absolutely bulging and soaked through with gravy and smelling utterly divine. He’d smuggled bits of the meal into his napkin as he ate, and the upshot was he’d brought me ham and greens and pudding—all my favourites. He said he was sorry I had to eat it with my hands, but I was starved, and told him he must only not scorn my eating it all in front of him._

_“On the contrary,” he said earnestly, as I scarfed down the lot of it. “It’s my own fault, Barbara. I’m sorry I’ve landed you up here. I’d have brought you ten platters, if I could.”_

_“This will do to be going on with,” I assured him, and shamelessly sucked the corner of the napkin to get out the last of the grease._

_“Still. I shouldn’t have teased.”_

_“It wasn’t such a good poem, anyway,” I said, for I can be magnanimous as anyone when I have something warm in my stomach._

_“It was pretty rotten,” he agreed, it was just as well he hadn’t brought a fork, else I might have stabbed at him with it. Then he shrugged and smiled, and said “but you are only eight, and a girl besides. Poetry is a man’s art.”_

_“That explains why you’re even worse at it than I,” I decided, at which dig a flash of temper lit his face, and made me smile. “There,” I said, “I feel we are ourselves again.”_

_“If that is so,” said Dick, “I shall take the napkin to be laundered, and leave you to sober reflection of your vice and scholarly ineptitude.”_

_“Goodness,” I cried, “is that what I am meant to reflect upon?”_

_“According to Mr. McTavish it is.”_

_“A world according to Mr. McTavish is not one in which I care to pass my days.”_

_“Very well then,” said Dick, “leave off your sober reflection, and come along to my room. I’ve a new set of jacks, and if you don’t waste any more time wallowing in contemplation of your incompetence, I think I’ll have time to beat you at three games at least before they come to check we’re asleep.”_

_I promised to join him directly he took the napkin away and I recorded the events of the evening, so he has left me to my composition book and I am all that is warm, sated and content. A picnic and game of jacks is probably not the punishment Mr. McTavish had envisioned when he carried tales of me to Father, but then, Mr. McTavish once called Dick a vainglorious coxcomb, and prophesied a foul end for him. Since I don’t allow anybody but me to speak of Dick that way, I bear Mr. McTavish no allegiance._

_As for Father, he should know better by now than not to lock me in. My conscience is clear._

“Of course,” put in a cheerful voice, “when I said my conscience was clear, I really meant I knew I should feel guilty, and couldn’t manage it. I was too like Dick in that regard.”

I looked up from the book to find a dark-haired girl with bright grey eyes standing in the middle of the library, smiling at me. Even if she hadn’t been wearing a sweeping, deep green gown about two hundred years out of date, nor claimed ownership of the writing I held, I’d have known immediately who she was. Her portrait hung in the house as well, just over the landing on the main stair, and a portrait done some ten years later hung on the wall in our home back in England. Yet even without either of those, I think I should have known her all the same: she had a strong look of her brother about her.

It was exactly like encountering a relation you’ve heard about all your life, but never actually met. On the strength of that recognition I felt no hesitation in setting the book aside and saying “oh! You were Barbara Grahame, weren’t you?”

“I still am,” she said, with just the faintest note of censure in her voice, so I took it that ghosts don’t always care to be addressed in the past tense. “And,” she added, “I want to apologise for my brother’s manner when he met you by the road. Dick can be so difficult.”

“That’s all right,” I assured her, “so can I.”

That admission seemed to charm her. She smiled and put her head to the side, as if she was learning me from the start.

“You know,” she said, “you’ve a real look of him about you.”

“Your brother?” I was unable to conceal my dismay. She nodded.

“Yes, very much so. It’s in no way an insult, you understand; for all Dick had such a good conceit of himself, he had some reason to. We Grahames have never been any too superior at affecting humility, I’m afraid. It comes of so much that we undertake coming right, in the end.”

The matter-of-fact way she put this reminded me of one of Mother’s stories in particular, which she’d always told sometime around Christmas night.

“Your brother was captured by Peaceable Sherwood,” I recalled. “But you worked out how to escape. You drugged him.”`

“So she told you  _that_  one, did she?” Barbara laughed. Her eyes were bright with pride. “Yes, I did, and I never once let him forget it either. I felt I’d earned the satisfaction; that night started off absolutely horrid, for me.”

Christmas is not a time for self-pity (Barbara admitted) but under the circumstances, I couldn’t help myself. And who could blame me? My brother was under lock and key in our very own house, shortly to be spirited away as a hostage against his own troops—the blow to Dick’s pride was undoubtedly what galled him most about this arrangement. I took a more practical view of the thing, and only hoped he would not contract dysentery while captive. The living conditions of Tory geurillas could hardly be sanitary—and I was the somewhat-unwilling guest of his captor.

To be sure, Captain Sherwood was no end of gallant, but his first mistake—aside from kidnapping me in the first place, which I didn’t like to complain about overmuch as it had the admittedly fortuitous side effect of saving me from freezing to death in a blizzard—was to let me see my brother.

Then he served me a meal on my own table, comprised of dishes he’d stolen from our neighbours, and had the temerity to make me laugh at his stories, so I thought I’d a very good chance of getting my own back. Lord knows he made me  _want_  to.

“Aren’t you worried Dick’s men will pursue you?” I wondered, testing the chicken and finding it beautifully cooked. “I mean, despite your threats to his safety.”

“Miss Grahame, “ Peaceable Sherwood reproved, “I hope I would not be so crude. What threat have I made?”

“You can pretend, if you like, that you have made none,” I allowed, “and I will indulge you in that.”

I was glad to see him squirm. “Indulge sounds like something one does to a child,” he said. I sampled the plum pudding.

“If you will insist on locking up my brother and strutting around my childhood home like a boy playing king of the castle, I don’t think treating you like a child is beyond reason.”

“Did I strut?” he wondered.

“There was certainly some strutting involved. You did well, though, to hold in your crowing.”

“A word of praise from a modest and pragmatic lady. I will treasure it always.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I muttered, and turned my attention to the potatoes. They were overdone, and my mood was such that I told him so.

“My apologies,” he said at once, “shall I have the cook whipped?”

Of course the cook was some neighbour or other who was now without potatoes, but I didn’t think the woman’s family suffered too much for their loss.

“That won’t be necessary. Although if your cook is Abraham Porson,” I added, referring to the unpleasant individual who had suggested I be left outside to freeze in the blizzard, “I might say yes for the sheer vengeance of the thing.”

A shadow, brief but dark, crossed Captain Sherwood’s face.

“Was Mr. Porson ungallant, Miss Grahame?”

“Mr. Porson is ungallant by nature, and we cannot hope he will mend his ways so late in life. I spoke as I did because I thought of a particular day in my childhood when Dick and I went into the woods with a friend to trip all of Mr. Porson’s snares.”

“Why in the world would you do such a thing?”  He didn’t speak in the manner of one who sneers or condescends; upon my word, he was intrigued. He really did want to know why Dick, Eleanor and I had sprung the traps.

“He always set them wrong,” I said. “The rabbits didn’t die at once, but screamed dreadfully. None of we children could bear it. My father spoke with Porson about it, but he said the meat was more tender if they suffered first. So we sprung the traps to prevent his injuring the rabbits, but of course when he found all the empty snares he knew it had been us. When next Dick and I went into the woods, he was waiting. He got Dick about the collar before he could get away, and whipped him.”

“And you?” Captain Sherwood asked, his voice very low.

“Well, I wouldn’t leave Dick, though he would yell at me so, and in between blows he kept ordering me to get away. I don’t do well with orders; I have never done. Instead of running as he bade me, I picked up a branch and hit Porson. It didn’t do me much good, since I was only a child and the branch was quite dead, but it soothed my anger. Of course it inflamed Porson’s temper to no end; when he was done with Dick, he turned for me.”

“I could have him whipped now, if you like,” Captain Sherwood offered. There was something in his tone, no matter how soft and courteous, that told me he meant it. I covered my shiver with a polite laugh.

“There’s no need. He never got more than one blow in because Dick wouldn’t have it, and Dick’s swing with the branch was much more solid than mine. We got away, in the end.” I pushed the potatoes to one side, the better to finish the pudding. “Though I do not think you will find Mr. Porson holds my brother or me in any too high a regard.”

I looked up, then, and caught sight of the expression on his face. It was one I have never seen before, nor ever cared to see again. He looked so very much more than grave.

“I suppose,” he said at last, “in this edition of the story, I play the part of Mr. Porson.”

I’m sure a proper, comforting kind of female would have reassured him at once that it was not so. I only shrugged, and cut a piece of ham.

“You do, in a way,” I agreed. “Certainly Dick went after you for your treatment of the, erm, local population. And now you’ve collared him for it, and I will not leave without him. But you have not injured him that I can see, and you have so far not injured me either. To the contrary, you saved my life. So although the mechanics, as you might call them, are alike in principle, the spirit of the execution is entirely dissimilar.”

I’ve never been any good at comforting speeches. Just ask Dick, and he will tell you about the time he spilled ink all over his copywork, and I thought to cheer him by saying well, he’d actually already made a mess of lines forty-eight through ninety-two, so better to start over anyway. He’s never pulled my hair so hard in all our lives.

But this speech, for all I had not meant it to cheer Captain Sherwood, seemed to buoy him immeasurably.

“That’s so,” he agreed, and looked much gratified. “Look here, Miss Grahame, have you ever heard the one about . . ?” and then he launched into the most ridiculous tale, so I could not help but laugh when he was done.

Anyone looking in from that point on would have taken us for the merriest pair of dinner companions you have ever seen. He told the most cunning stories, and I laughed with all sincerity at each. I suppose what I am trying to say is that it wasn’t  _all_  a deceit. Only most of it.

The thing about brothers is, if you’ve lived with one any length of time you’ve seen him in every stage, from best to worst. Dick locked up in our family gaol was by no means the worst he’d ever been (there is a story about a wasp’s nest, which he has solemnly bound me never to tell, that outstrips any number of gaol cells) but it was the worst way I’d ever seen him when I had somebody on hand to blame. And I did, indeed, blame Peaceable Sherwood.

I didn’t care how charming he was or courteous or complimentary about my wits—a pleasant change of pace, I’ll own, from the tutor we had as children, who seemed bound and convinced I was as fluff-brained as my brother was conceited—he had locked my brother up, and one way or another, I would even the balance.

Dick’s foot, rapping furious code against my ankle, had communicated more or less the exact message he’d given me that day when Abraham Porson set on us in the wood: RUN. But then, if you’ve lived with brothers for any length of time, you develop an immunity to their powers of persuasion.

I let Peaceable Sherwood sit across from me at a table beautifully laid in my house at his command, and I let him talk.

His stories were not all light amusements. Some were of things his men had said, or done, since they first arrived. As each of those came up, I floated over the battlefield, as it were, and made a memory of the way he told it, drawing the map in my head. An encampment here, a skirmish there . . . some would undoubtedly be known to Dick already, but I hoped a few, at least, would be new information.

Information he could use, as soon as I had got him free again.

“However did you get started in this line of attack, Captain Sherwood?” I wondered. “It is an unconventional approach, to say the least, and Mr. Porson for one is a trained soldier. He is not the sort of man who would fall in with just anyone.”

“I am flattered you think me more than a mere anyone,” Captain Sherwood smiled. “And no indeed, Porson was not my first recruit. He came to me by way of another gentleman who used to stop in the George Tavern and commiserate with Porson’s beliefs about the war.”

“Your network is extensive, Captain Sherwood,” I murmured. “How far does it reach?”

“It reaches far enough that I know your clumsy fishing for information is unworthy of your family’s reputation for tact and finesse.”

I wondered who in the world could have told him Dick, Father or I had any reputation for tact and finesse. Apparently his network was not so extensive it reached to people who knew us intimately. I took some comfort in that. Certainly he had not noticed my previous efforts at drawing him into revelation. I already had a rather detailed map of certain camps carried in my head, and was fairly itching to get to some place of safety and writing implements, that I could copy it all down.

“One does what one can to further the cause,” I said. “Forgive my patriotism, Captain Sherwood.”

I think the plea for forgiveness was entirely too pert to charm, but he laughed all the same, and promised he’d do his best to absolve me.

“As to how I got started,” he added, “it was almost entirely by chance. I was what you might call in the right place at the right time. There was a proper battle going on, and I’d been sent back to carry a message to General Clinton. Not on paper, you understand—too risky. But I had it in my head, and one outrider with me, and we’d a very good chance of getting through the line when we rounded a corner and very nearly rode right into the middle of a camp. Another four yards and we’d have been out of cover, completely exposed.”

“You avoided that, I gather.”

“We did. And we were about to ride back, and find another way around, when it occurred to me that these fellows were the ones who would be relieving those on the field, and it might be for the best, all around, if I were to make it difficult for them to do so.”

“What did you do?” I asked. I did not have to feign interest in the story; I could too easily picture a lithe figure in lobster red crouched in the bushes, plotting furiously.

“It was not my most  _thorough_  attack, you understand,” he declaimed modestly, “for I’d very little time to carry it off. But there was a stream behind me, and a store of powder before me, and I introduced the one to the other just as fast as I was able. Then my outrider and I made our way around, but it got me to thinking, you understand. About how much could be done by very few. It’s truly shocking, Miss Grahame, the amount of calculated misery that can be visited on a group by the influence of a single person.”

“I am well aware,” I assured him. “I believe I mentioned my Aunt Susanna.”

“Ah yes,” he leaned forward, “Aunt Susanna. Is there more you can tell me about her?”

There was, of course, much more I could have told him. But to my discomfort I suddenly found that I  _wanted_  to. I wanted to dance out my every awful Aunt Susanna story for his amusement, to lay them before him and make him laugh. I wanted him to know about what it had been like to grow up with Dick as my brother, as my companion on the couch in that dark little house of hers, where he had seen me so frightened and thought to distract me by whispering in my ear that the whole place smelled of misery.

I wanted to make Captain Sherwood see why I had got to do what I was going to: not because I particularly disliked him, but because that was my brother down there in that room, and no matter how charming or debonair the officer who’d caught him, my loyalties could not be swayed in the space of one snowy afternoon.

I’d already discovered they could be broadened, and that was uncomfortable enough.

“Aunt Susanna is awful,” was all I said. “Be glad she is not yours.”

Then I ducked my head and attacked the chicken, and let him talk at me about his own awful guardian to his heart’s content. It did not seem very festive, I thought, to betray somebody who had just fed you a Christmas dinner. But then there wasn’t anything too festive about stealing that dinner in the first place, I reminded myself, and certainly there was nothing in the spirit of the season about enjoying a meal when your brother was kicking around an empty bean pot in the cellar.

So this was not a fine Christmas meal, and Captain Sherwood’s company could not change that. I was so pleased to have convinced myself of the fact that the following thought slipped in before I could catch it:

 _The next Christmas dinner we share will be better_.

“Miss Grahame?” Captain Sherwood paused in his tale. “Are you quite well? Your colour is most high.”

“It must be the wine,” I murmured, and set aside my glass. “Do continue, Captain Sherwood.”

He looked unconvinced, but went on anyway.

“And at least she isn’t your guardian,” he lectured. “Do reflect for a moment—” but I only half heard, because my face was still hot, and I was completely out of temper with myself.  _Our next Christmas dinner_ , indeed!

As if I would ever share another Christmas dinner with the likes of Captain Peaceable Drummond Sherwood.

Barbara paused, then, and had the grace to look discomfited, if such an expression can be attributed to a ghost.

“I told him many years later what I’d thought at the time,” she admitted. “He was . . . amused.”

“I can imagine,” I murmured. “But you got away in the end, after all. And it  _is_  a little funny you were so sure you’d never share Christmas dinner with him again—why, you must have shared dozens.”

“We did, indeed.”

“We’re rather a family of absolutes, aren’t we?” I reflected.

“We are. Whether they are accurate absolutes or not, we hold fast. There are worse legacies, Meg. It shouldn’t surprise anybody, our wanting to pass that on.”

“Pass it on to whom?” I asked, but Barbara only smiled, and shook her head.

“Later,” she said. “I think at present, you had better go out into the front hall. The doctor should be here soon.”

And such was her air of assurance, I did not even question the instruction, but went at once to the hall to await the man’s arrival.

 

* * *

 

I was not surprised that the doctor came. I’d have been more shocked, I think, had he not. But I was somewhat surprised to learn he had not come to see about Great-uncle Enos.

He’d come to visit Mother.

They were shut up in her room for almost an hour, and although I tried not to worry, Dad’s pacing put me right off. He paced the whole time, and when the doctor called him in I took to pacing as well. I rambled up the stairs, down the length of the corridor, then swung around and paced right back. There was nothing useful in it, but there was something steady; soothing.

I took to pausing on the landing beside Barbara’s portrait and staring up at it, the smiling, proud girl in the crimson cape, a dark horse behind her and one hand adjusting a lock of hair just so. I tried not to resent her assurance, but it was difficult. Barbara couldn’t understand this; as far as I knew, she had not grown up with a mother.

“I wouldn’t say so to her, though,” a low voice behind me recommended. I yelped and spun about to find Richard Grahame, cloakless, standing at my back and also staring up at his sister’s portrait.

“You shouldn’t sneak,” I scolded. He only smiled, and I understood then Barbara’s inclination to kick his shins.  “And what do you mean,” I added, “you wouldn’t say that to her?”

“I mean Barbara knows she grew up without a mother. She felt the lack very keenly, at times, and I would not thank you to remind her of it, even now.”

“Oh.” I looked back to the portrait. “Very well, then.”

I did not ask him what happened to their mother. Somehow, even then, I think I was afraid to know. And when Dad and the doctor came down the stairs, and Dad looked so pale and drawn, I was even more afraid—so much that I didn’t even mark it when Richard Grahame disappeared, as surely he must have done, for them not to have walked right through him.

After the doctor left I said “Dad what is it?” and he only said I’d better go up and speak to Mother directly. So I did, and she told me.

“A new baby isn’t bad news, Meg,” she laughed. “Try not to look as if the world is ending!”

But it wasn’t the baby I was scared for, and she knew it. Because there had been other babies, or had been going to be, and none of them had happened. I was the only one. But even though they never happened, they’d all been very bad for her. Nobody would tell me exactly why or how, but I knew one of them, the last one, had very nearly killed her.

“The thing we thought was my flu, those months ago,” Mother explained, “it was actually the baby. And when I came over here, I suspected, but Uncle Enos was such a distraction I never bothered to make sure. Now . . . well, now we’re sure.”

“Will we go home?” I asked, but she said no, she would stay and it would be born here.

“The doctor doesn’t like me to travel now,” she said. “He thinks it will increase the risk.”

She did not only mean the risk to the baby. I sat, stiff and silent, and let her talk at me a while longer. I nodded and smiled and said nice things. I tried to make her believe I was happy, but inside I only wanted to scream.

 

* * *

 

I think Dad felt as I did, but he hid it much better. As the weeks went on and Uncle Enos slowly got his strength back, and kept pestering everybody about the first journal and carrying on the family legacy, Dad moved his writing desk in to be with Mother, who was not allowed to get out of bed, and talked with her about everything he wanted to write.

I couldn’t do that. I could only show Great-uncle Enos’s new carer around the house and see her settled in, and read books in the library while the rain drizzled down.

One day, there was a lull. Dad was bemoaning his lack of source material, Uncle Enos was yelling at his carer and the house felt so close, I had to escape. I borrowed a pair of galoshes from Zinnia and fled into Martin’s Wood, not particularly caring which way I travelled as long as there was nothing but clean, damp air and ancient trees around me.

I must have walked for a quarter of an hour before I came across it: a sort of clearing in the wood, or what had once been a clearing, before it grew up so dense with fern and low-lying brush nobody had bothered to cut back.

The trees hung close overhead, so they held the worst of the rain off my neck, and underneath a feeble tangle of slender green growth I saw that the ground had once been packed so hard and flat, only the hardiest of plants could now grow.

“This was where we played.”

I yelped and turned to find Richard Grahame standing in the clearing, staring at the ground.

“ _Must_  you sneak up like that?” I said, aggravated. “First on the road, then on the landing, and now out here as well. I mean really, it’s indecent.”

Richard smiled.

“A girl who takes that view of things hasn’t got a brother,” he informed me. “Any girl with a brother is more than used to being spied on.” He paused, then qualified, “and any boy with a sister, come to that. Barbara was the worst sort of sneak, some days.” He looked around again, and if a ghost could be said to look wistful, Richard Grahame was the wistfullest. “This was where we played.”

“In the woods?”

“Yes, all over, but particularly here. It was our secret place. There was a hut just there that we had built ourselves,” he waved his hand at a copse of birch, “and a creek. Barely a trickle, really, but you know how it is with children. In our minds it was the Aegean, the Bosphorus and the Hellespont all at once. We would pretend we were the Athenians and Spartans at Aegospotami, or Neoptolemus and Priam at Troy, or whatever else we had learned in lessons that day.”

“Did you always play at being people who tore each other to shreds?”

“Mostly,” he said cheerfully. “Though one time we played Penelope and Odysseus.” He paused. “I don’t know that we really thought that one through.”

“Didn’t you have any friends?” I frowned. He looked surprised.

“We had each other.”

“Yes, but . . . I’ve friends at school. They have brothers, and they have friends. It’s two different categories, usually.”

“Is it?” Richard looked thoughtful. “Perhaps if Barbara and I had gone away to school, it could have been like that too. We studied together under a devil of a tutor. He was almost fanatical on any number of subjects, and I didn’t go out of my way to soothe any feathers I ruffled. So when it’s like that, you see, and you only have each other, you make the most of what you have.”

“And make wars in the Aegean?” I couldn’t resist adding. Richard had the good grace to smile.

“And make wars in the Aegean,” he conceded, with a lordly little bow. “You may laugh if you like, but all our playing at wars served us well in what was to come.”

“You mean, with Peaceable Sherwood?”

That, certainly (agreed Richard Grahame) but I meant what happened after he was dispatched from the area. The war didn’t stop, you know—though to see Barbara’s face sometimes as she looked out the window and pined for the fellow, you might have been pardoned for thinking it had—and not everybody who had worked under Peaceable’s command had gone from the region.

Abraham Porson, for one, stayed behind in the woods and tried to keep up much the same kind of activities. Now praise God he lacked the brain to pull it off quite as well, but he had a soldier’s training for order and method, and that very nearly did us in a few times.

The closest shave we ever had was almost two years to the day since Barbara met Peaceable Sherwood. I knew that because of course it was two years to the day since I’d been caught out like a fool in my own home, and locked up with a pot of beans and a courteous redcoat for my jailer.

Barbara had got it into her head that we needed a Christmas ham, and somehow she worked Eleanor over to her side on the point as well. With the two of them worrying at me about the ham, I didn’t see there was anything for it but to find a ham, somehow, and get some peace.

I’d heard from the Tatlocks that the George Tavern had several hams, and so I got the idea that one could be bought for our dinner. Only as it happens everybody we normally would have sent to do the buying was involved in making the dinner, so I resolved to set out and get the thing myself. Somehow it became a party—I think Barbara was largely to blame. She did not like anybody to set out into snow unaccompanied, even two years later, and so contrived that she and Eleanor would travel with me.

Thankfully, the snow falling then was nothing like the blizzard Barbara had set out in when she wanted to spend Christmas with Eleanor and me. When I looked over and saw Eleanor in her cloak, with snowflakes dusting those few curls peeking around her hood, I think I felt as close a thing to poetic as I ever did in my life.

Of course I made the mistake of trying to recite something, and I got it all wrong. Eleanor laughed—she was not a feeling-sparing creature, my lovely wife—and Barbara chose that moment to remember a poem she’d written about me when we were children. It was not flattering in the least, but Eleanor thought it highly creative, and the pair of them made multiple variations on it all the rest of the ride to the tavern.

Which should be a lesson, I think, that few are gifted with poetry, and only those who are should ever attempt it.

When we reached the tavern, both the girls were laughing so they could hardly dismount. I handed them both down, and let them precede me into the tavern while I saw to the comfort of our horses. I feel I should have noticed something, but in truth there was nothing to notice. The smoke rising from the chimney was not at all sinister, there was a pleasant glow in the windows, the tavern was banked round with firs to keep out the chill, and the whole scene, snow-dusted and cheery, was one of perfect welcome.

When I got inside Barbara was still warming herself by the fire, but Eleanor was calling for somebody to see to us. I heard her call maybe three times before it occurred to me to ask how many she had already called before I got in.

“A few,” she said, frowning. “I don’t like it, Dick. Shouldn’t there be someone here?”

There should have been, and I didn’t like it either. Barbara, meantime, was leaning a little forward toward the fire and frowning at something else entirely.

“How peculiar,” she said. “Dick, do come see— _look_   _out_!”

At the note of panic in her voice I turned and saw Abraham Porson trying to make a run across the tavern. We worked out later he must have been hiding in the stairwell, waiting for the right moment to escape. Only instead of trying to escape, he was running straight at Barbara, where she stood by the fire.

I made a grab for him when I saw this, but Barbara had already fit her hand under her cloak. She looked pale but unshaken, and when he came within striking distance, it was not Abraham Porson who struck first. He toppled to the hearth with a small dagger sticking out of him, and I do not know which of we three—Eleanor, Porson or myself—were more shocked.

Certainly Porson was the most permanently affected, overall. We found the kitchen maids cowering in the back room and sent one out for a surgeon but Porson did not survive to see his arrival. We were given not one but two fine hams by the very grateful staff, who had not been at all pleased when their former master crept back, half starved and looking for a Christmas dinner.

On the road home, as I tried to balance the ham across the saddle, I asked Barbara where in the world she’d got the notion to ride out with a dagger.

“Two years ago,” she said crisply. “Christmas.”

“Ah,” I said, and she nodded.

“Not everybody who tries to take you home wants to serve you plum pudding, after all,” she concluded, and that set a very sombre tone to the whole thing. It took us fully most of that afternoon and evening to recover the same level of gaiety as before.

“It’s a good thing she had the dagger, though,” I pointed out, and Richard Grahame, looking around the place where he had played as a child who would one day become a soldier, nodded.

“It was one of the best decisions she ever made, or so I told her, to carry it with her. And she didn’t hesitate that I could see . . . but then, she never did hesitate when it came to quarrelling with me when we were children, either. You never do know when a thing will come in handy, I guess.”

He took one last look around the clearing.

“It was a good place to grow up. A good way to start out. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

Then he was gone, as quietly as he’d come, and I was alone in the woods.

 

* * *

 

Something about the visit from Richard Grahame put me in mind of Great-uncle Enos, so I went to see him before bed.

His room was a clutter of medical equipment and papers. I guessed Dad had brought the papers in; I knew they spent some time working together each day, though I wasn’t sure how that worked, exactly. He wasn’t working now; he was very still and pale in his bed, so much so that I did not know even for sure that he still lived. But I crept closer, put my mouth to his ear and whispered:

“It’s all right you know, after all. The family line, what you’ve been on about—Mother is to have another baby. So maybe it won’t end with you after all. I know even if it is a boy he won’t be a Grahame, which you might be disappointed about, but it will still be a Grahame after a fashion, and,” since I felt even being possibly very near death did not excuse Great-uncle Enos from hearing a hard truth or two, “after all, you can’t expect to have it  _all_  your own way, can you?”

Then, because I felt maybe I’d been a little impolite, I added, “and maybe you will get to be one of the ghosts, and see it all for yourself. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t hear me, or maybe he was just too tired. But I’d said what I felt he needed to hear, so I crept back out of the room once more, and left him there.

 

* * *

 

Nearer the time the baby was to arrive, Mother started having a more difficult time. She couldn’t sleep properly, and she got so restless she even knocked over Dad’s writing desk and everything on it, just trying to make herself comfortable.

Dad moved the writing table to a corner after that, and looked at it less. I think somehow Great-uncle Enos found out, because he got very agitated and insisted that Dad come to him and promise a lot of things about the first journal and the family line and Dad didn’t understand half of them, but he understood it was important to Mother that her uncle be calm, so he swore he would do his best.

When he spoke to Great-uncle Enos, I sat with Mother and told her anything and everything that came into my head, except the ghosts. I felt like she wanted to ask me, but didn’t want to actually hear. For whatever reason they had not chosen to appear to her—maybe they even couldn’t—and I think for her it was both good to know they hadn’t vanished completely, but awful to know she couldn’t see them herself.

When Dad came back and took over keeping her company, I wandered back to my room, and tried not to feel too utterly alone and frightened.

“It isn’t fair,” I whispered to the unfeeling air around me. “Why should it be so easy for some people? Mother’s never done anything particularly terrible . . . why shouldn’t she have as many children as she likes, just as easily as she pleases?”

“I think you’ll find,” said a new voice, very low and gentle, “that life is rarely lived in terms of ‘fair’ . . . though I am fond of the conceit that it should be.”

I looked over and saw him lounging in the corner of my bedroom, one shoulder against the wall, a curious tension drawn all through the long, lean frame. I did not have to see the face, which I’d seen on our walls at home who even knew how many times, to know who he was.

“Did Barbara . . .” I said, then stopped. “I mean, was it very . . .”

“Yes,” said Peaceable Sherwood, “Barbara had the very devil of a time. Two children, we managed. That was it. When the second one almost killed her, I said enough.”

“You shouldn’t have had a second,” I snapped, as though it were any of my business. He smiled very faintly indeed.

“If we hadn’t, you would not be here to hear about him.”

“I don’t care. Nothing’s worth . . . nobody’s worth . . .”

“As it so happens,” he sighed, “I agree. But there was never any arguing with Barbara when she’d made up her mind.”

“You needn’t speak as if that trait were unique to her,” I said sharply. Peaceable Sherwood still smiled at me, but now it was an awful smile, all gentle and sympathetic, like he knew exactly what was in my head just then.

“People will make their own choices,” he said. “I will own that for those of us accustomed to making choices, it is . . . difficult to allow others to choose, too. The family motto, after all.”

“I get what I want,” I muttered. “I’ve never liked that.”

“We like it more when it’s true for us,” Peaceable Sherwood agreed, unperturbed. “When the thing another family member wants is got at our expense, I find we like it less.”

“Did Barbara ever get any other things she wanted, that you didn’t?”

“Dozens,” said my ancestor cheerfully. “No, absolutely scores, perhaps even hundreds—I think I lost count shortly after she named the second child Peaceable Richard Enos. You just don’t keep counting after a defeat of that magnitude.”

“I should think not.”

“And she’s the one who got me to give up chasing French spies around Europe, as well. Of course by that point I was getting on in years, so she wasn’t wrong to want me home, but I think she could have been more understanding about it. I can’t  _prove_  she arranged for the first grandchild to happen when it did, but I have my suspicions. She sent word that we were going to be grandparents and that brought me directly home, some weeks before Trafalgar.”

“Are spies usually permitted to choose when they leave the field? For grandchildren and things like that?”

“Probably not,” Peaceable Sherwood shrugged. “But if you think I was going to miss my daughter introducing her son to me, you have an even worse appreciation of human nature than the spymaster who pretended he had charge of me. He blustered and forbade, I nodded and agreed, and then, when he was asleep, I left. He, in the end, never did come home. I will leave it to you to decide who was in the right.”

“I may say he was, just to spite you.”

“Good lord,” he leaned forward to study me in rapt fascination, “you  _do_  have a good deal of Grahame about you, haven’t you? We Sherwoods are stubborn, to be sure, but there’s a particular type of spite I’ve always said was unique to the Grahame line. Barbara disagreed.”

“In that case,” I said, “I take her part.”

“There, you see! Spiteful. And Richard was, too. Not to say he wasn’t very gracious about our alliance—it was what  _she_  wanted, you see, and for all he did tease her, he wanted her to be happy—but there were times . . . you should have heard the language when he lit into me about using Porson in my network.”

“Your colonial guerrilla network?”

“Yes, not the French one—Porson was quite dead by then. Not that I’d ever enlist the services of a man who behaved like such a brute to my family of course, but there was not even the option of a decision, by then. No, Richard could not see what I’d seen in the man to begin with, and it took me nearly a month to get him to understand. Barbara, having as I have always said the superior intellect of the pair, understood much sooner.

“Though he was a hard man and a braggart, he was, in his own way, discreet. Certainly Porson was useless when it came to finesse, tact or strategy, but when you wanted a secret kept, there was no man likelier to take it to his grave. Any kind of secret: I wanted it kept, I shared it with Porson. And he believed in the cause. It would have cost me far more to leave him a free agent than it did to bring him into the group and use his expertise to my advantage.”

“I think you’re just making excuses for taking on a man who’d hurt Barbara and her family.”

“Don’t sauce your elders,” Peaceable Sherwood ordered, and I scowled. He seemed quite staggered at the sight.

“Lord, but if you aren’t the image of them both, when you do that . . . all thunder and vinegar, if such a combination exists. You know, Porson tried to set me against them, especially as I brought Barbara into the house that Christmas. I didn’t know any of the history between the families at the time but I thought his protests were vehement to the point of absurd. I ignored them, though I did not dismiss him from the group.”

“I don’t know that your wife or her brother would thank you for that—keeping him on, I mean.”

“They were not my wife or brother when I recruited him, and once they were those things to me, I hope you believe he would not have stayed recruited any longer than it would have taken me to run him out of town.” The idea of a redcoat running a Loyalist out of town painted an amusing enough picture that I reflected on that a moment, and smiled.

He seemed to guess in what direction my thoughts travelled, for he smiled too. Then he sobered, and looked around my room. It took me out of the past, and brought me squarely back to the only thing that mattered: Mother, and the baby that she might or might not live to see. Again as if he understood what I was thinking, Peaceable Sherwood sighed.

“I cannot say anything that will make you glad or easy in your mind,” he said. “I wish I could. It’s not a science, what happens here. It’s . . . a gift. A small comfort, if you will, that we offer when we may, to whom we may. And when we may no longer offer it, sometimes I wonder if it was ever any comfort at all.”

I thought at once of Mother’s letters, and how she had hoped to see them again: the ghosts that had done something well enough, perfectly enough, that she just wanted the chance to talk to them once more.

“I think it must be a comfort,” I said. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time—to you, or them.”

Peaceable Sherwood smiled at me then, and in his face I could see a bit of the reason Barbara had spent all her time moping about and looking out the window after he left. But before I could tell him so, he was back to bossing me around.

“Go to bed, Margaret Patricia,” he said firmly. I couldn’t help but notice his tone was very like the one Dad uses, when he attempts to be stern and paternal. “Sleep. It will do you good.”

I could have argued, of course. I’m good at arguing. But the pillow felt so soft, and all of a sudden I remembered how tired I was. So instead of arguing I put my head down and for a few sweet hours knew nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

That last month at Rest-and-be-thankful while we waited for the baby to come, I did not see any ghosts. I went all around the house, I read books in the library, I tramped through the wood and I went into town with Dad when Mother took a fancy for anything in particular, but I did not see ghosts.

I did spend many mornings sitting in a chair beside Mother’s bed, reading to her out of Barbara Grahame’s commonplace book, making her laugh until tears ran down her cheeks.

“ _Oh_!” she cried at last one day, putting a hand to her face, “oh, Meg please stop, it hurts.”

I was alarmed, but she quickly assured me she meant only the pain of laughing for too long at a time, and nothing that warranted the doctor.

“You run to the mother hen at the oddest moments, you know, Meg,” she said, but it was not so much criticism as mystified observation. “I can’t think where you get that. I don’t run to the particularly maternal, myself.”

“You’re all right,” I said, which was not exactly a lie. Mother has never been a petting kind of person, and she’ll never be as plump and motherly as the Mrs. Hopegoods of the world, but I don’t think I’d do half so well with a mother who was.

Mother smiled, as if she knew exactly what I meant, and let her head droop against the pillow.

“All right,” she said, “I suppose there is that saying about laughter and medicine . . . let’s have another, then.”

So I picked up the book, and read the nearest entry.

_Dick has done it again. He swore to me most solemnly that when next Father obliged me to visit Aunt Susanna, he would bear me company for the duration. Only just as I should have guessed, when Father began to fret that we were overdue in our duty to our ailing relation (which meant, of course, she had written to him to say exactly that) Dick suddenly remembered a solemn appointment he had made and could not possibly think to break, and said he was very sorry but I must go alone._

_I called him a liar. He told me a suspicious nature was an unfeminine and unbecoming trait, and thought the less of me for exhibiting it._

_I hit him with my composition book and he went down like a top._

_Now Dick is laid up in bed with a terrible knot on his head, and all I can say in my own defence is that I had not thought my composition book as heavy as all that—certainly Mr. McTavish has given me to believe he thinks it does not contain much of weight, merit or consequence._

_Had I suspected the true power of my pen, I’d have struck my own head against the spine of the thing. My assault of him has quite neatly got Dick out of visiting Aunt Susanna, and I should gladly concuss myself if I knew it would guarantee my escape from the living headache that is our aunt._

I looked up at that point to see Mother smiling sleepily at the ceiling over her head.

“But instead you sat there, trying to smell the misery,” she said softly, almost to herself. Then she sighed. “All right, Meg. I think that’s about all I can stand for now.”

I wished her a happy rest, and tiptoed from the room.

 

* * *

 

 

The next day Dad spent over an hour shut up with Great-uncle Enos, then came directly to the library to find me.

“I’ve got to get out, Meg,” he said. “I think I’ll take Betsy for a drive, or something. Don’t think badly of me, will you? Only, it’s this house. Seems to grab hold of everyone who ever meant anything, and . . . take them.”

I did not tell him not to fret, and that everything would be okay. I did not try to reassure or calm or any of those things.

I said “can I come with you, then?” and he said yes.

It was a clear, calm day, a nice change from all the rain. Dad handled the wheel with a kind of painful care, the way he does when he’s got an old manuscript to read and he thinks it might all go to pieces in his hands. I suppose Betsy, in her way, was a bit like that manuscript. She had outlived most everybody involved in the making of her, and even those people to whom she meant something important couldn’t be sure how much longer she’d be around.

“Dad,” I said, “tell me about the day you met her.”

“Your Mother?” He didn’t look away from the road. His thumb smoothed a chip in Betsy’s wheel, and he smiled. “She came out of the wood with her shoes all over mud, and found me cursing this car. I suppose it said a lot about her sense of adventure that she didn’t immediately turn around and walk the other way . . . I talked an awful lot of nonsense to her, but she still hung on. I had it in mind even then that we should probably get married. You’d do well to marry anybody who doesn’t shy off when they find you at your worst.”

I could think of a few times I’d seen Dad worse than what he’d described, but didn’t say so. Instead I asked him about his most recent conversation with Great-uncle Enos.

“Was it very bad?”

“It wasn’t as bad as the first conversation we ever had. I doubt any one ever could be.”

“Is he still asking about the family line?”

“Oh, that!” Dad laughed. “Your mother and I think we’ve finally sorted out why he’s so agitated. It’s the publication I have coming up. Well,  _had_  coming up . . . I can’t make it come right, and with everything now, I don’t think . . . but yes, he was very concerned that I have proper documents to work with. He’s got it into his head that Peaceable Sherwood’s first journal is what I need—the one he brought with him to the colonies, and kept to document the first months of his guerrilla efforts.”

“I thought you’d already published that.”

“No, I published the rest of them. There are references made to this other journal, so that’s how Great-uncle Enos knows about it. He must have forgotten we’d long since agreed it had been destroyed during one of the raids.”

“So he thinks you should find and publish something that doesn’t exist anymore?”

“That’s about the sum of it, yes. Oh look—there’s where I left you that night we arrived,” Dad indicated a cluster of oak trees. “Don’t mind saying it nearly gave me a heart attack when we got back and found you gone. Your mother calmed me down, said you had probably just gone ahead to the George . . . and of course she was right.”

We rounded the bend, hit a rut in the road and Betsy spat her fury in a cloud of exhaust. Then she died, without ceremony, in front of the George Tavern.

“Right,” said Dad. “Well, at least they’ve got a phone.”

He took me in with him, and I found the George not much more populated than it had been that first night. I looked at it with more interest this time, now I knew all about Mr. Porson. I wondered who had taken it over after he disappeared, and when. Surely a tavern wasn’t the sort of business you just fell into. There’d be a learning curve involved. The place would probably have run itself for a short time, if the staff was well trained, but you’d still need a brain behind it, somebody to see to the ins and outs of business and planning.

Planning . . .

I stopped in the middle of the tavern room, suddenly aching with the knowledge that I knew something, only I couldn’t remember what. It was like a mosquito pestering you in summer, then buzzing just out of reach before you can swat it. I waited, rigid and still, for the whisper of a memory to float by once more.

_Porson was useless when it came to finesse, tact or strategy, but when you wanted a secret kept, there was no man likelier to take it to his grave. Any kind of secret: I wanted it kept, I shared it with Porson._

Any kind of secret.

Oh that  _man_. That infuriating subtle snake of a man. Give me a Richard Grahame any day; I’d far rather kick a shin and start a blazing row that’s done in an hour than spend four weeks solving a riddle.

Still fuming silently at my long-dead ancestor, and questioning his wife’s wisdom and good taste in the alliance (I hoped they both could hear me, somehow; if they could I was sure they were laughing, but I didn’t care, so long as they  _knew_ ) I turned a slow, deliberate circle, searching for what I knew must be there, though I couldn’t be sure exactly where.

In the end, I settled on the fireplace. For all that the room did not look much changed over the years, I thought the fireplace the least likely place of all to have been tampered with. Beside that, there was Abraham Porson’s reaction when he found Barbara warming herself beside it. There were not many reasons a soldier would first attack a woman halfway across the room rather than the man or woman much closer to him, unless he’d thought she posed a greater danger.

If standing near the fireplace posed a danger, that was where I figured I had better start.

That there might be nothing in the tavern at all did not even occur to me—by this point, thanks to Mother and the ghosts and of course the man himself, I was so acquainted with Peaceable Sherwood that I knew that had been his idea of a clue. And if it turned out there was nothing here at all, well then, I would simply have to work out some way to kill a ghost.

I poked at the mantel, more so I could feel I had tried something than out of any idea where the actual hiding place might be. No knotholes clicked or secret panels gave way like they do in stories, so I bent and squinted into the fireplace itself.

It was warm enough today that there was no fire. I studied the arrangement of bricks, smoke-blacked with age. They were all laid horizontally, staggered slightly in their arrangement . . . except for one that stood straight up, a lone vertical soldier in a sea of sideways stone slabs.

It couldn’t sure be  _this_  easy . . . but then, who would be reaching into a fireplace and poking at the bricks, under ordinary circumstances? And hadn’t Richard Grahame said that just before Barbara saw Abraham Porson make his attack, she’d been looking into the fireplace, and started to call him over? A man three pints in might not notice a brick at the back of a fireplace, but a little girl who grew up making imaginary battle plans on real maps would be a different story.

I inched closer and ran my fingers over the soot. Once I found the seam, where the mortar separated, it was easier. I hooked my fingertips around the brick and pushed, then pulled. When that was not enough, I picked up the fireplace poker and chipped fiercely at the seam until I felt the whole arrangement give way. It did not come easily, but with a grit and grate of stone on mortar, it did eventually, slowly, slide forward and drop neatly into my palm.

In the cavity behind the brick was a small packet of what in better days had once been oilskin. It did not appear to have been disturbed since Peaceable Sherwood left his secret with Abraham Porson all those years ago, and then, for whatever reason, neglected to return to collect it.

Maybe he just hadn’t known where Porson hid it to begin with.

I gingerly lifted the packet from Porson's hiding place and stepped back from the fireplace to hold it up to the light. Carefully, ever so slowly, I peeled back the cover, which was cracked from heat and brittle with age, and lifted the cover of the little book to read the faint, spidery lines scrawled across the first page.

_Uncle should be taken out and shot. This is the most miserable journey—_

I turned one page, then another, and read a few lines of each before I let the cover drop. I was still staring at the book when Dad came back to tell me he’d got in touch with Tom Lloyd, and persuaded him to come resuscitate Betsy, if it were possible at all.

“But what’s that you have there?” he wondered.

“It . . . it’s the journal, Dad. The first journal.”

I held it out so he could see, though he made no move to take it. He only stared, so I kept talking.

“I looked at a few pages. It’s his—Peaceable Sherwood’s. And the dates line up. It’s the first journal. You—you could publish it, if . . . well I don’t know who owns it, really. I suppose Mrs. Hopegood might, if she owns the tavern. I found it just there, behind a brick in the fireplace. It must have been there since the war. It would be dry in there . . . I suppose as long as the place the hole was set was chosen with care, whatever you put behind it would be safe.”

Dad looked from the journal to me, then back to the journal again. For what felt like an age, he didn’t seem to know what to say, then all at once he let out a whoop, caught me around the waist and spun me around the room.

“Meg, you marvellous, ridiculous child, how in the world did you know? How long it must have—Mrs. Hopegood! Mrs. Hopegood, did you know you’d a clandestine document hidden in your wall for centuries?”

“Eh?” Mrs. Hopegood appeared, blinking, in the doorway. “Heaven help us, is there a nest of them? I can set a trap.”

So naturally, some explanation was warranted. By the time Mrs. Hopegood understood exactly what had been found—at least, as much as she could understand with Dad and me both trying to explain at her—she decided it was really ours to begin with.

“After all, that’s your ancestor is it not, Mr. Sherwood? Yours and Miss Margaret’s. It’s only right and fitting you should have his private papers. You take it right along with you, now, directly Tom Lloyd comes to repair that car. If it  _can_  be repaired . . . I’ve little hope left for the contraption at this point.”

But Betsy was sterling worth, and Tom Lloyd was maybe something of a magician. With a tap and a clank and what looked like five gallons of oil, he got her going again.

“Now don’t you stop for nothing, Sir!” he shouted over the roar, and Dad gave him a brisk little salute.

“Not rain nor sleet, Mr. Lloyd!” he called back. “Come on, Meg; home!”

And I realised, as I clambered over the side and took my place beside him, it was no longer just the word used to describe the place Mother came from. When Dad said ‘home’ of Rest-and-be-thankful, I think he meant it. And I felt it, too.

Betsy was surliest of we three, that drive back. She coughed and lurched and made all manner of threats, but even Betsy could not thwart Dad’s mood. She got us home with only two brief, sputtering stalls, and Dad got her going again with a kick and a whoop. As we topped the last rise and looked down at Rest-and-be-thankful, heavy and old and full of memories I’d never live long enough to learn, Dad started to whistle.

It took me a moment to place the song— _It's a Long Way to Tipperary_. Dad only pulls that one out when he feels something too big to put into words, so I smiled as Betsy coasted down the final hill and stopped before the main doors.

As soon as we walked in the house, we both knew. There was a kind of tension in the air, all nervous excitement, and when Christopher tottered toward us, I think we both could have beat him to the announcement if we’d wanted:

“The doctor has been called.”

All the colour rushed from Dad’s face a second time that day, but this time, he did not smile.

“Right,” he said, and put one hand over his mouth. “Right.”

Then he headed right up the stairs to find Mother, the journal forgotten in Betsy’s backseat.

 

* * *

 

While Dad resumed his pacing until the doctor finally told him to cut that out and come make himself useful, I fetched the journal in of course, and I saw it stored in those bookcases Great-uncle Enos used for his most fragile documents. Then I visited Great-uncle Enos, who did not try to communicate, but seemed content to sit in his chair and look out over the farmland.

“Isn’t it a fine thing,” I asked softly, “to be at home?”

He sighed. That was all, just one sigh. But it came from his bones, and I thought for a minute I heard in it a faint echo of  _yes_.

The carer took him to bed soon after and I went to my room, but I didn’t sleep. How could I? I sat up in bed, Barbara’s journal held tight between my hands, and thought terrible things as the stars came out.

“She loves you all very much,” I whispered to ghosts I hadn’t seen in weeks, now. “You know she does. She was lonely when she met you, and I can understand that. Sometimes I’m lonely too. But  _please_ —I don’t want her to be one of you. Not yet. Not for years and years and years. Please . . .”

I don’t know if they heard me. If they did, they gave no sign. But I resolved to read Barbara Grahame’s book cover to cover, and sometime between the two covers fatigue got the better of me and I nodded off. It was Petunia who woke me, poking her head through my door just before dawn to ask if I was awake.

“Yes.” I dug at one eye with the heel of my hand. Then I remembered, and went stiff all over. “Is it . . . Is Mother . . .”

“It’s over, Miss Meg,” Petunia reassured me, crossing to the bed and patting my shoulder with a comforting solid hand. “All done, everybody’s fit as you please.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling the mattress dip and swell underneath me with the force of my own relief. “Oh, thank you, that’s—” I broke off, a question occurring. “But please, what . . . is it?”

Petunia smiled, bright with joy and promise.

“It’s a boy,” she said. “You have a brother.”

Then she bustled from the room to make herself useful elsewhere, leaving me to wrap myself in my housecoat and nervous anticipation.

There was no way I could sleep again before sunrise.

I tiptoed along the corridor to the door of Mother’s room, and reached it just as the doctor was leaving. He looked all done in but when he saw me, he smiled a tired, gentle kind of smile, patted my shoulder and said I could go in if I liked, only I was not to tire my mother too much tonight. I was on the verge of promising I would not, when Dad’s voice went up from beyond the door, and I realised, with a start, that he and Mother were actually having a row.

“Peggy!” Dad’s cry was almost a howl .”Peggy, you can’t, it’s too cruel!”

“His  _second_  name, Pat,” Mother shot back, cool as you please. “I don’t ask that it be his first. But you won over Meg’s name, so I intend to win over this. You may argue if you like—I feel quite fit for it, I warn you—but I intend on winning in the end.”

So Dad, who’d probably also been ordered not to tire Mother out, gave way meek as you please, the argument ended, and I was invited in to meet my new brother.

“Name pending,” Dad added.

“Nonsense,” said Mother. “Johnny is a fine name. Damn it, Pat, Johnny was  _your_  choice in the first place.”

“Johnny was,” Dad agreed, “but that was before we’d even married, and the second name was certainly not—”

“It’s a  _family_ name,” Mother snapped back, quivering with a Great-uncle Enos sort of indignation. Dad threw up his hands.

I decided they could sort all that out in their own time, and went directly to look at the baby.

He was tucked in a little basket beside the bed, small and scrunched up, and he didn’t look like much of anything to me. But I didn’t say so to Mother, who looked peaky and frail, and Dad, who looked like he still hadn’t got over the worry of it all just yet. Instead I lifted him carefully, and thought of the way Richard Grahame had talked about the smell of misery to distract his sister, and how Barbara had flown, dagger drawn, at the spy who tried to kill her brother.

In that moment every memory and story of what had already happened in our family, all down through time, spun up around me in a kind of promise of what could be. I even fancied that for a second, all four of them—the ghosts of Rest-and-be-thankful, the ghosts of Sherwoods and Grahames alike—were huddled around the bassinet, as if to welcome Jonathan Peaceable Sherwood to our family.

I did not look round to check if they were really there; I didn’t need to. The very notion that they might be gave me the peace and promise I needed to look down into the red, wrinkled face and say “Hello, Johnny. I’m your sister.”

He screwed up his face, like the idea didn’t impress him as much as it should have. I shifted my arm to hold him better and tried to picture a day when he would be more interesting than a bundle of bleating baby in a blanket.

I imagined how we could haunt the library on rainy days and learn maps to make wars on. I thought of creeks and streams that could be our Bosphorus, and swells of ground that would serve as Alps across which to drive our elephants.

I’d be grown by then, of course, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t come home to teach him all the things a brother ought to know. I could sneak up on him and catch him doing all the things he’d hate for me to know, and I was certain he would do the same to me in turn. We could write messages with all the wrong letters in upper-case to trick whoever found them.  We could sit at the dinner table and kick each other’s ankles and nobody else would ever know what we said. We would argue over the most absurd and inconsequential things, and perhaps someday I’d watch him marry a girl he had once professed to loathe.

Maybe someday there’d even be a war on again, and between us we could put every experience of our childhood to more secret, sombre use.

Or maybe not.

But either way . . .

“Grow quickly,” I ordered my brother, equal parts Grahame arrogance and Sherwood self-assurance. “I’ve no end of games for us to play.”

Mother smiled at us both and Dad settled onto the bed to take her hand in his. Johnny’s little foot twitched against my arm, as much as if to say ALL RIGHT, THEN _._

And I knew in that moment, it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, recipient! I still can’t quite believe my luck at matching on _The Sherwood Ring_ ; it was such a welcome excuse to reread the book and dig back into the Sherwood/Grahame world.
> 
> Title comes from the Abraham Potter excerpts included in the book. Meg and Johnny's names, of course, are taken from the book as well . . . it seems they really didn't buy her that umbrella!
> 
> All the best of the season to you, Ione, and I hope you enjoyed.


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